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My first post of the "new" Forum and I'm I'm hoping that someone can help with a problem that I've recently encountered...

Over the years that I've been shooting stock, I've kept to the same work-flow...shoot RAW, process the images and save them as Tif files; then append the copyright details, captions and keywords to the meta-data using PS (CS4) Bridge.  When the images are finished, I convert them to Jpegs and upload to the relevant agency.

Recently, I realised that some of my earlier work (about 350 images) would be greatly improved if I re-processed them from the original RAW files. The snag is that the metadata is now on the Jpegs and I can't find a method of BATCH transferring the meta-data from the original jpegs to the newly processed files. Copying and pasting that many pics feels like an awful chore.

Does anyone know if it can be done or have any suggestions/pointers to where I might find out how to do it?

 

Thanks...  George

 

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I'm pretty sure that EXIF Tool will do what you need. See http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

 

It takes a while to understand all it can do as it's extremely powerful. It's got a Windows GUI mode and a command line mode. You may need to use the command line mode. If I recall correctly I used it once to automatically insert EXIF data I had in a spreadsheet into all the jpg files in a directory. It matched the jpg filename to the appropriate entry in the spreadsheet and inserted the info. I'm pretty sure it can also extract EXIF data and put into a CSV file.

 

Back up your jpgs files before you start in case you make a mistake!!

 

Must have another play with it sometime.

 

Here's some info on how to use Exif tool to copy Tags from one file to another.

 

The "-tagsFromFile" Option

A special ExifTool option allows copying tags from one file to another. The command-line syntax for doing this is "-tagsFromFile SRCFILE". Any tags specified after this option on the command line are extracted from source file and written to the destination file. If no tags are specified, then all writable tags are copied. This option is very simple, yet very powerful. Depending on the formats of the source and destination files, some of tags read may not be valid in the destination file, in which case they aren't written.

This option may also be used to transfer information between different tags within a single image or between different images. See the -tagsFromFile option in the application documentation for more details.

 

The Windows GUI that goes with EXIF Tool can be found here http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/~bogdan/exiftoolgui515.zip

 

Mark

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Thanks Mark...that will be great help - I tried copying and pasting about 50, it took an age, dreadfully repetitive and I got "mouse-cramp"; although some good music took away some of the pain!.  I'll try it over the weekend and let you know it all works out...enjoy yours!

 

George

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Use MediaPro. You create a new catalogue file, and import all your existing JPEGs (or TIFs, but the extension does matter). Then: Synchronise > Import Metadata from Files - this puts all your keywords and captions etc into the relevant fields of the catalogue. Save catalogue.

 

Now, reprocess your images and save new TIF or JPG versions in this folder, REPLACE each image with an identically named new one so that the old one is deleted. MediaPro will associate the old metadata with the new image, because it has the same filename.

 

Finally: Synchronise > Export Metadata to Files - this will inject the metadata into the new files.

 

It may be possible to do the same in Lightroom but I find the selection and file handling better in MediaPro for my purposes.

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Update: I decided to try Mark's suggestions sooner than anticipated...

 

I ought to add that my tekkie skills are somewhere between poor and moderate, so it all looked rather daunting at first. However, I found a helpful web page at  http://freeweb.siol.net/hrastni3/foto/exif/exiftoolgui.htm    which explained the initial steps very clearly. Using that information, I downloaded the two links i.e. EXIF Tool and Windows GUI and ran the program using copies of the two sets of pictures, to be sure, to be sure, and worked first time...

 

BTW, from what I can gather, the program will also enable other aspects of Exif/metadata to be modified and copied etc.

 

Thanks to Rob and David for taking the time to add your suggestions ... and to Mark, many thanks again...

 

George

 

PS The link doesn't appear to function, but does if you copy and paste!

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Update: I decided to try Mark's suggestions sooner than anticipated...

 

I ought to add that my tekkie skills are somewhere between poor and moderate, so it all looked rather daunting at first. However, I found a helpful web page at  http://freeweb.siol.net/hrastni3/foto/exif/exiftoolgui.htm    which explained the initial steps very clearly. Using that information, I downloaded the two links i.e. EXIF Tool and Windows GUI and ran the program using copies of the two sets of pictures, to be sure, to be sure, and worked first time...

 

BTW, from what I can gather, the program will also enable other aspects of Exif/metadata to be modified and copied etc.

 

Thanks to Rob and David for taking the time to add your suggestions ... and to Mark, many thanks again...

 

George

 

PS The link doesn't appear to function, but does if you copy and paste!

Glad it solved the problem.

 

I also had another look at it last night. It is very powerful. I managed to use it to turn the automatic distortion correction tag ON or OFF in my Lumix G5 RW2 files. So now I have the choice of whether LR4 throws away so many edge pixels or not when processing wide angle shots. Altering the "Scale" tag setting in the RW2 file also allowed me to keep the distortion and CA correction of ACR in LR4 but maximise the number of retained pixels. I'll probably make a separate posting on this at some point.

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